How to find someone's email address: 7 methods that work

You found the perfect prospect on LinkedIn — now you need their email. Here are seven methods that actually work in 2026, roughly in order of speed, plus the one step most people skip that quietly wrecks their deliverability.

1. Use an email finder tool

The fastest option. Email finders take a name and company (or a LinkedIn profile) and return the most likely address, usually pre-verified. This is the highest-leverage method when you're prospecting at any real volume — manual methods don't scale past a handful.

2. Guess the pattern, then verify

Most companies use a consistent format: first@company.com, first.last@company.com, or flast@company.com. Find one known email at the company (a public “contact us” or a team member), infer the pattern, and apply it. Always verify before sending — see method 7.

3. Check their personal site or link-in-bio

Founders, creators, and freelancers often list an email on a personal site, portfolio, or the “links” page in their social bios. A quick visit beats guessing.

4. Look on GitHub, talks, and papers

Technical prospects frequently expose an email in GitHub commit history, conference speaker pages, or academic papers. If you're reaching engineers or researchers, these are gold.

5. Search public records of their content

Newsletters, podcast show notes, and press mentions often include contact details or a company domain you can pattern-match against. A targeted search of their name plus “email” or “contact” sometimes surfaces it directly.

6. Ask a mutual connection

Underrated and highly effective. A one-line intro from a shared contact both gets you the address and warms the outreach. If you share connections on LinkedIn, this is often your best move.

7. Always verify before you send

This is the step that separates healthy senders from spam-foldered ones. Sending to unverified addresses drives bounces, and a high bounce rate damages your domain reputation — which hurts every future email. Verify each address (check that the mailbox exists) before it enters a sequence.

Do it automatically while you prospect

Doing this by hand for every lead is a grind. Qampi finds and verifies prospect emails as part of your workflow, then writes personalized outreach across LinkedIn and email — so “find the email” and “send something worth replying to” happen in one place.

Then make the email count

Finding the address is half the job — the message has to earn a reply. When you're ready to write it, see cold email vs LinkedIn outreach for how to sequence it with your LinkedIn touches.